Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Pray That I May Have Wisdom

A selection from a letter by Jonathan Edwards to Rev. Thomas Foxcroft, pastor of the 1st Congregational Church in Boston. Foxcroft was a supporter of Edwards, who was going through a difficult time in his church over baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Edwards took a position, contrary to that of his esteemed grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, that only those who made a good profession of faith in Christ could come to the Lord’s Table. Edwards told his friend that he might be removed from the pastorate by the congregation, a fear that was later realized. Though he had no other way of supporting his family, he was resolved to be steadfast in the faith. The letter was written May 24, 1749.

If I should be wholly cast out of the ministry, I should be in many respects in a poor case. I shall not be likely to be serviceable to my generation, or get a subsistence in a business of a different nature. I am by nature very unfit for secular business; and especially am not unfit, after I have been so long in the work of the ministry. I am now comfortably settled, have as large a salary settled upon me as most have out of Boston, and have the largest and most chargeable family of any minister, perhaps without an hundred miles of me.

I have many enemies abroad in the country, who hate me for my stingy principles, enthusiasm, rigid proceedings and that now are expecting full triumph over me. I need the prayers of my fathers and brethren who are friendly to me, that I may have wisdom given me by my great master, and that I may be enabled to conduct with a steady faithfulness to him, under all trials and whatever may be the issue of this affair. I seem as it were to be casting myself off from a precipice; and have no other way, but to go on, as it were blindfold, i.e. shutting my eyes to everything else but the evidences of the mind and will of God, and the path of duty; which I would observe with the utmost care.

Jonathan Edwards: Letters and Personal Writings, edited by George S. Claghorn, vol. 16 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Yale University Press, 1998, p. 284.

1 comment:

Yes Dean a very good artcle on Jonathan Edwards who was a great preacher in the USA and what he prayed for that he would have wisdom.And we all need to have some wisdom in our christian lifes today in the wicked world we live in.But thank God that we will be going to a better place soon when our Lord returns.May i wish you and your wife Linda and family also the church a very Happy Christmas and New Year2010.I will be leaving on Monday for Ireland for three weeks for Christmas to spend it with family and friends.So keep up the Lord's good work and serveing his kingdom to the Glory of our God and saviour.Amen

About Me

Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Moody Stuart said, "Ruth Bryan's letters are remarkably like those of Samuel Rutherford's, closely resembling them in most winning, unwearied, and gloriously endless eulogy of the King in His beauty." Joel Beeke says, "Ruth Bryan stands in a class of great female devotional writers, such as Anne Dutton and Mary Winslow, whose Christ-centered correspondence has helped hundreds of God's people drink more deeply of the wells of salvation."